Читать книгу Tutankhamen and the Discovery of His Tomb by the Late Earl of Carnarvon and Mr. Howard Carter - Grafton Elliot Smith - Страница 5
ОглавлениеTUTANKHAMEN
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
Never before in the history of archæological inquiry has any event excited such immediate and world-wide interest as Mr Howard Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb in November 1922. Very little is known as yet of the king himself, but twelve months hence no doubt his mummy will give up its secrets and perhaps the story of his life will be revealed. But at the moment he is supposed to have been merely a colourless youth, who reigned for a few years only, and achieved such notoriety as is associated with his name by virtue of weakness rather than strength of character. For his religious and political opinions seem to have been as plastic as those of the famous Vicar of Bray, adapting themselves with facility to his changing environment. The objects so far found in his tomb do not add very materially to our knowledge of history.
Yet, in spite of the unimportance of Tutankhamen himself and the comparative lack of new historical data, the world-wide interest the discovery has evoked is amply warranted by the new appreciation of historical values it affords.
It gives us a new revelation of the wealth and luxury of Egyptian civilization during its most magnificent period. The value of the gold and precious objects far surpasses that of any hoard previously recovered from ancient times. Judged merely by its quantity the collection of furniture is the most wonderful ever found; and everyone who has examined the individual pieces agrees that in beauty of design and perfection of craftsmanship Tutankhamen’s funerary equipment is indeed a new revelation of the ancient Egyptians’ artistic feeling and technical skill, far surpassing anything known before.
The fact that the tomb of so insignificant a personage as Tutankhamen was equipped with such lavish magnificence adds to the importance of the discovery. For if a youthful nonentity who reigned no more than six or seven years in one of the leanest phases of Egypt’s history had all this wealth poured into his tomb, one’s imagination tries in vain to picture the funerary equipment of the famous and longer-lived pharaohs, such as Thothmes III, who established the Egyptian Empire in Asia and could command the tribute of the then civilized world, or Amenhotep III, under whom the sovereign power in Egypt attained its culmination, and luxury and ostentation their fullest expression. Or again what riches must have been poured into the vast tombs of Seti I and Rameses II, the powerful pharaohs who recovered for a time the Egyptian dominion in Asia which Akhenaton and his sons-in-law had lost? A thousand years before Christ the desolate Valley of the Tombs of the Kings must have had buried in its recesses the vastest collection of gold and precious furniture that perhaps was ever collected in one spot in the history of the world. For these reasons alone there is ample justification for the world-wide interest in the discovery which will always be associated with the names of Lord Carnarvon and Mr Howard Carter.
But apart from its interest as an artistic revelation and the intrinsic value of the objects found the discovery is important for other reasons. The dazzling display of skill and luxury has forced the scholar and the man in the street to recognize in some measure the vastness of the achievements of ancient Egyptian civilization and to ask themselves whether this vigorous and highly developed culture could have failed to exert a much more profound influence upon its neighbours than is generally admitted. When it is recalled that Egypt herself devised the ships and developed the seamanship which created the chief bond of union with Syria and Crete, East Africa and Arabia, the Persian Gulf and beyond, we should be in a better position to realize the plain meaning of the evidence that points to Egypt as the dominating factor in shaping the nascent civilization of the world. The wide interest in the revelation of Egypt’s achievements more than thirty centuries ago should prepare men’s minds impartially to study the vast significance of the facts thus displayed by Mr Howard Carter’s investigations.
Besides revealing the wonderful equipment of a royal tomb the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb enables us to examine many objects and articles of funerary equipment hitherto known to us only in pictures. This makes it possible for us not only to study and appreciate the nature of the things themselves, but also to acquire new confidence in the accuracy and the reality of the scenes and the objects depicted upon the walls of the tombs and the pictures inscribed on papyri. Many of the illustrations that have long been familiar to us in the old books of Belzoni, Lepsius, Rosellini, and Wilkinson, have acquired a new meaning and a new reality from the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb. Moreover, when the examination of the tomb is completed, and we learn something of the mummy, the king’s distinctive features, his age, and his ailments, we shall be able to read the history of his time more clearly, and perhaps be able to appreciate the deeper significance of one of the most piquant phases in the history of civilization.
At the time of Tutankhamen the great peoples that had built up civilization were losing their dominant position. Egypt’s power was showing definite signs of weakness, which were intensified rather than caused solely by the pacifist policy of Akhenaton and his sons-in-law. For even the vigorous rule of the powerful pharaohs of the nineteenth dynasty merely revived Egyptian power for a time before its final collapse. Fifty years before Tutankhamen, the Palace of Knossos had been destroyed in Crete, marking the downfall of the great pioneer of Mediterranean civilization to which Greece and Europe as a whole became heir. Babylonia also had reached the limits of her influence: and the weakening of these three earliest great powers allowed the Hittites and the Assyrians to struggle the one with the other for supremacy, crushing out such states as that of the Mitanni, and by exhausting themselves, so prepared the way for the eventual incursion of Persia into the Mediterranean area.
Another reason why the sudden weakening of Egyptian influence in Asia under Akhenaton and Tutankhamen is so important an event in the history of civilization is because it occurred at a time when the literature of the Jews was becoming crystallized in the shape that was destined to exert so tremendous an influence upon the history of belief and social practice. If Egyptian rule had not been weakened at this particular time and Palestine had not been subjected to the disturbing influences of Syrian, Hittite, and Assyrian interference, the Old Testament would not have been composed in the atmosphere of strife that gives it its distinctive tone and seems to us to-day unduly to exalt the importance of warfare and the value of military courage.
But if the weakness of Akhenaton and Tutankhamen contributed in some measure to the facilitation of strife in Palestine and its reaction upon the sacred literature of the world, the times in which these events occurred were pregnant with new trends in the development of civilization for which these weak kinglets could not be held responsible. Aryan-speaking people had recently made their appearance on the stage of history for the first time, in Asia Minor and around the head waters of the Euphrates in Syria, and in the approaching disruption of the powers of Western Asia, the influence of these people of Indo-European speech was destined to make itself obtrusive in Persia and India and exert a growing influence upon religious beliefs and social practices.
But simultaneously with these events of far-reaching significance in Asia, the people of Europe also first intruded upon the attention of Egypt, and revealed the fact that a new orientation of political influence was in preparation.
Between Asia and Europe the disturbances in the Levant played some part in launching upon their world-wide career of exploitation the persistent trading people we know as Phœnicians, who were responsible for the rapid diffusion of the elements of civilization during several centuries from Tutankhamen’s time onward. At the moment it is the fashion to scoff at the Phœnicians and their works: but no one who seriously studies the evidence relating to their achievements is likely to be deceived by this pose. For there is no doubt these people did fulfil the rôle attributed to them in the Book of Ezekiel.
Map of the Ancient East.
The period which is so brilliantly illuminated by the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb is thus perhaps the most critical period in the whole history of civilization. A new era was dawning and every scrap of information that sheds any light upon the circumstances of this fateful time is of tremendous interest to us in understanding the civilization under which we ourselves are living.
